1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to event monitoring and, more particularly, to automated systems and methods for enterprise event monitoring.
2. General Background and Description of Related Art
Many business organizations have adopted or are moving toward an enterprise-wide view of disparate business functions, operations, and applications. The advent of networked computing systems made possible by, among other things, the Internet, has provided a means by which business organizations may choose to reengineer and/or integrate business processes which previously may have been isolated within a particular function or geographic location. Accordingly, one business trend has arisen of providing visibility into standalone software and system applications across many suborganizations throughout the entire business enterprise regardless of geographic location. An enterprise may therefore include the multiple geographically dispersed computing systems that support various functions of a common organization or group, such as a business organization (e.g., company, corporation, joint venture, etc.).
In order to integrate various the business processes across an enterprise using this approach, the individual applications may share results and data. As these individual applications may include standalone and legacy applications having unique, proprietary, or incompatible message and data formats, the need has arisen for methods and systems that can mediate or adapt the different data formats used by one application for use by one or more other applications. Enterprise brokers have been developed to provide this functionality. An enterprise broker may include an adapter capability for each enterprise application that needs to exchange information with one or more other enterprise applications. The adapter capability may include mediation software, also known as middleware, to convert information from one application format to another in order to provide inter-application communication and passing of information transparently to the applications. Inter-application messages that include the exchanged application information may flow through and be managed by one or more enterprise brokers. These messages may be referred to as data events.
In the development and troubleshooting of enterprise integration systems, it is often required to investigate the source, destination, and intermediate routing of data event messages flowing throughout the enterprise. For example, technical personnel may need to investigate and resolve problems involving data event timing or synchronization among applications. Data event monitoring systems may be useful for real-time monitor and historical or post-mortem review of data event flow throughout the enterprise in support of this need.
Furthermore, communication of data events between enterprise applications or nodes may occur under a variety of topologies. One example of a communication topology is the circular pattern, in which each enterprise node is connected to two other nodes to form a circular communication path. In the circular pattern, inter-application data events may be passed by each intermediate node until the data event message reaches the destination node. Another example of a communication topology is the hub pattern, in which each enterprise node is connected to a single hub node that routes all data event message traffic. For any given enterprise, the sizes, types, and frequencies of data event messages are variable. Due to these factors at least, data event message latency time will be affected by the type of communication topology chosen.